News Forum - Maldivian tourist caught smuggling 25 live birds out of Thailand

[Thaiger]

Officials at Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok caught a tourist attempting to smuggle 25 exotic live birds out of Thailand on a flight to the Maldives yesterday morning, reports KhaoSod. Customs officials made quite the discovery when they inspected luggage destined to board flight PG711 to Malé in the Maldives at 9.20am, reported Prasert Sornsathapornkul, the Director …

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[Guest1]

Trying to : "Maldivian tourist caught smuggling 25 live birds out of Thailand" ;-)

[Rookiescot]

He only bought them because they were going cheap. 

[Chatogaster]

 

I am convinced that this cruel type of trafficking is on the brink of extinction.

It's a matter of years, not decades, before luggage scanners become artificially intelligent enough to detect nearly all cases like this (it could even be achieved this year since it's just a matter of investment if there would be an urgency). 

PS: this by no means is a call to put the perpetrators on a new kind of protection list, although I wouldn't mind to preserve some bodies for the purpose of exposing them in future musea to show future generations there once was a time people believed they could fool the system.

 

[kalyan]

i dont think it is wrong because it is available for sale, he bought it and carrying it. Most important he must have declared the luggage with a cage of animals, why at that time he was not allowed, why he is being caught later?

If a country gives animals to another country, is that acceptable?  If a commoner carries, it is a crime?

If is he is buying to kill and eat, then it is a crime, if he is buying it for sale in another country, there is no crime, as this was available for sale in thailand.

[Chatogaster]

2 hours ago, kalyan said:

i dont think it is wrong because it is available for sale, he bought it and carrying it. Most important he must have declared the luggage with a cage of animals, why at that time he was not allowed, why he is being caught later?

If a country gives animals to another country, is that acceptable?  If a commoner carries, it is a crime?

If is he is buying to kill and eat, then it is a crime, if he is buying it for sale in another country, there is no crime, as this was available for sale in thailand.

 

Thailand ratified CITES (which is all about international trade) in 1983, and engraved it into law in 1992.

Now, while I would agree that what's in agreements/law isn't always the same as what's morally right, you can be sure that because of that law he didn't bring a cage of animals of several CITES-species up for closer inspection at the "I have something to declare"-lane.  The birds were stuffed in luggage (with the hope that a financially satisfactory portion would survive the trip).

Although the following is besides the previous, judicial point, it may be more important from a moral point of view: even if those birds wouldn't have some protection status, trafficking them in the way intended would be a case of animal cruelty.